The other night at dinner, I asked a bunch of male friends which female celebrity they liked the most, because that's the sort of useless inanity I like to contribute to otherwise intelligent dinner party conversations. I was certain they would pick either
Dr Jane Goodall or
Helen Garner, so you can imagine my shock when I heard their response:
'ZOOEY DESCHANEL!' the entire room full of young men screamed out in unison, which was quite an achievement because everyone was drunk and in my experience noone can pronounce her name properly even when they're sober.
Now, although I understand that
Zooey Deschanel (born 1980), is a gorgeous young woman with
many talents, there just seems to be so much adoration lavished on her in my peer group that even though the only movie I have ever seen her in is
Elf, my natural instinct is to just hate her for no other reason except that everyone else seems to love her. This, as you can imagine, leaves an enormous gap in my life which I've been hoping for some other piercingly blue-eyed, brunette celebrity to fill. Someone who isn't Katy Perry though.
So thank god for the wry, witty, smart and brilliant
Frances Bean Cobain (born 1992), who is quickly overtaking both Dr Jane Goodall and Helen Garner as one of
my favourite people on earth! I totally think she's the bees knees, despite the fact she has only ever given four interviews in her young life and she
deleted her Twitter account on October 6, leaving me with nothing but faded memories of her brilliant, old-fashioned movie reviews, and her insights into the bad DJ-ing skills of the boys at her LA high school.
RIP @GoFackADawg.
And your mum, too.
Anyway, apropos of absolutely nothing except for the conviction that the media simply doesn't put two women together side-by-side and compare and judge them
nearly enough for my taste, I present to you: The battle of Franny and Zooey.
BUT FIRST, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Do I even have to mention that this post is brought to you my favourite book when I was a teenage girl, JD Salinger's
Franny and Zooey, and—just to briefly digress even further—I think if more teenage girls were reading THAT BOOK these days instead of the
Twilight series, we might have
fewer vulnerable, needy, helpless young women getting themselves embroiled in vampiric relationships, and more
young women who lack the ability to get themselves embroiled in any sort of relationship at all because they are way too spiritually confused and intensely verbose for any sort of man, even a dead one, to ever possibly be interested in them.
But enough about me—LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!!
CATEGORY 1: INTERESTING TURNS OF PHRASE
I decided that first of all, I should compare the two ladies' verbal flair. So I did some thorough online research for about ten minutes, and came back with some raw quotes in order to make my official assessment.
First up, Franny. From her most recent interview, in
Harper's Bazaar:
ON HER PEDIGREE: 'If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."
ON BEING ASKED IF THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL: 'More like a glass is just there.'
FRANNY'S PERSONAL CHARACTER ASSESSMENT OF HERSELF AND HER MOTHER: 'Mom and I were like 30 minutes late for the airport because we're both very flaky people.'
I refuse to concede that Courtney Love might possibly be a flaky
person, but apart from that, I just really like this girl's style.
Meanwhile, over at the Deschanel camp. I pored over hundreds of Zooey interviews and, just like the professional journalist I am, I desperately tried to use a quote out of context to show her up in a smarmy manner completely unworthy of my good upbringing, motivated solely by something mean inside me that irrationally hates her guts.
But I honestly couldn't find anything terrible about her! Instead, what I discovered is that she is sort of quite clever and articulate.
Sure, she's not as interestingly-spoken as Franny, but maybe that's because if you're the wife of the guy from Death Cab for Cutie your own feelings tend to get a little suffocated under the whiny emotional intensity of his.
The only thing I can find to hate about her is her blatant disregard for my favourite book.
When asked how many times she's read
Franny and Zooey, she replied:
'Once. Just once. Maybe twice.'
But then straight away I was FOILED AGAIN by her irritating skill at being a worthwhile human being! Because then she revealed that the
reason she's only read it once—'maybe twice'—is because she has such a voracious reading appetite! Because who has time for re-reading
Franny and Zooey when:
'I'm constantly reading! I read like ten books at once, I'm like one of those people. I got one of those Kindle things. So awesome. The Kindle 2. I'm reading this book called Under the Banner of Heaven
.'
Hey! That is
that Jon Krakauer book about Mormon murderers! HEAVY! I'm starting to like you more and more, Mrs Zooey Deschanel-Gibbard.
Only one category in, and I can't help but wonder if there might be room for more than one piercingly blue-eyed brunette in this town. Which brings me to:
CATEGORY 2: MOST PIERCINGLY BLUE EYES
To properly judge whose eyes pierce more blue-ishly out of their dainty sockets, I took pictures of both gals to my local shopping centre and randomly shoved the images in front of people's faces to judge their reaction:
Everyone just shrieked and called for help and it all ended when I got thrown out by the 16 year-old manager. I will therefore call it a tie in this category.
CATEGORY 3: TWITTER
My devastation at finding out that Zooey Deschanel is probably actually just as nice as any other girl you might bother to spend your time and energy masturbating over was so enormous that I had to resort to judging her by a standard that I hope to god noone ever judges me by.
Twitter.
There is honestly
no competition in this realm as to who is the better woman. Even though Franny deleted her Twitter account on October 6th, it is all archived
here, thank god, so now
everyone can see how amazing she was at it!
Franny's Twitter account is really what made me love her in the first place, and I feel a bit emotional about the fact it doesn't exist anymore and I don't really want to talk about it anymore if it's okay with you. But if you ever have a spare fourteen hours to read all her tweets from the beginning, I guarantee you won't be sorry.
Zooey, on the other hand, has had nothing better to give us than
one paltry tweet, back at 8.05am on August 18, which was:
'I hemmed. I hawed. I joined twitter. Reason? I saw "The Cove" this weekend and it blew my mind. Everyone should see this movie. -zd'
I'm sorry, but presuming that this is actually the real Zooey Deschanel, that is even shitter than MY most boring tweet ever, which was at 4.22pm on September 7 of this year and said:
My parents bought a lot of new mugs while I was away.
Actually, come to think of it, that was my probably my wittiest and best
ever tweet, but when you consider that Zooey is a proper CELEBRITY and should be entertaining us all the time, then it doesn't look good to just give us one tweet and then that's
it.
Franny wins this category hands down, but now I am so confused about my newfound admiration for Zooey that it almost doesn't seem to matter anymore.
FINAL VERDICT
The very fact that Zooey has probably decided to stay away from Twitter so she can get on with her career instead is something I admire and could probably learn a lot from.
But Franny's very dedication to the cause, despite her recent adieu, makes me endlessly love her forever and ever, too.
I thus pronounce
both Franny and Zooey excellent role models, worthy of your time and attention, and I seriously can't believe it took me eighty thousand words to come to that conclusion and I'm so, so sorry.
I think from now on it will just be so much easier on both you, my loyal readers, and the RSI in my wrist, if I simply decide to never hate another living person for the rest of my days.